m u t e d
by keet
Summary: Orihime never liked silence


It only took her half a day to completely familiarize herself with the room. White floors, white coffee table, white overly large couch, all illuminated by the silvery thread of moonlight spilling from the high window. The small door led to an equally small washroom, with the barest necessities to keep her clean. Pacing undecidedly from one edge of the room, her thoughts frantically echoed with her footsteps.

_Tap, tap, tap._ What exactly happened? _Turn, tap, tap, tap. _How long was she going to be in here? _Tap, tap, tap._ Kurosaki-kun would come. _Tap, tap, turn, tap. _But when? What did Aizen need her for? _Tap, tap, tap, tap._ What role could she possible contribute to his plans? _Tap, tap. Stop. _She wouldn't help him. She couldn't. That would mean aiding the enemy and betraying her friends. She couldn't do that. She wouldn't. But what would they do to her?

She stifled a sob into her hand as fear washed over her. She knew what the hollows were capable of, she had seen it many times before. As for Aizen, she knew little. The fact that he had wanted to kill Rukia-san was foremost in her mind; he wanted to cause harm to her friends, and in her mind Orihime reckoned that he could just as easily harm her. She wasn't strong, like Kurosaki-kun, and knew that she couldn't fight her captors. If she resisted, would they threaten her with pain? Would they kill her?

_Tap, tap, tap_. If they killed her, then she couldn't heal her friends when they rescued her. _Tap, tap, tap. _Then somehow she had to resist and hinder Aizen's plans while remaining alive. _Turn, tap, tap, tap._ She could do that. With a goal set firmly in her mind, her pacing continued unconsciously.

"Woman."

She hadn't even heard the door open, or the figure of her guard enter. She gasped quietly and turned towards him.

"Stop that."

Without even waiting for a reply, the apathetic green eyes disappeared behind the locked door once more. It took her panicked mind a few seconds to comprehend that Ulquiorra had meant her pacing. Moving softly towards her window, she wrapped her arms around herself and let her thoughts consume her once more.

Days seemed to drag on in imperceptible units. The moon beyond her window never moved, and she was only able to tell time by its waxing and waning. In the times she wasn't eating, washing, or sleeping, she was staring. Staring at the moon, staring at tiny, distant, moving dots she assumed were hollows in the desert, or staring at her hands, the floor, the wall as she sat on the couch. Thoughts became sluggish, and she challenged herself to remember the plot of movies and books for entertainment.

She wasn't sure how long it took before she started to speak to herself. The silence had become deafening, and her ears rang with it. It always took her a few moments to realize she had spoken out loud. At first she had closed her mouth and blushed in embarrassment, before questioning the reason for her reaction. No one had heard her. No one was listening. And then she remembered what sound was. Her voice was quiet to her ears as she recited lines from her favorite movies, or replied to an imaginary question. She never spoke too loudly; she didn't want her captors to think she was insane.

It was quite a while before Ulquiorra even noticed she was speaking in his absence. After they had been eating meals together for some time, she became acclimatized to his presence, and hardly noticed him when he first arrived. He watched her as she gesticulated animatedly as she spoke quietly, all the while gazing out the window. As the serving hollow set the plates down on the table, the sound of cutlery jolted the human from her reverie.

"Ulquiorra-san," she said with a gentle smile. She took up her usual position on her couch and waited for him to be seated. While they ate, the arrancar mulled over his observations, and eventually decided it was of trivial nature, and did not need to be reported.

Shortly after she began to speak out loud, she began to hum. Music had been a fairly important aspect to her life since her brother's passing. Without anyone else in her house, it was always too quiet. She always had the radio playing softly in the background whenever she was home. Top hits, classical, alternative; it didn't matter, as long as there was noise.

But in this room, in this dead world, there was no noise. Again. The silence was driving her mad. Another way to remind her of her loneliness. Songs she had always loved were the first to surface from her memory. Some recent hit music, old folk songs, and the American 80's pop music that her brother loved so much. She didn't know the words to most of them (she had always found the music more important than the lyrics), so she hummed them lightly under her breath. Some days she invented her own lyrics to suit her fancy. There would be a stretch of days when one song would cycle endlessly through her mind, and its tune was always on her tongue. She never sang with the high school choirs, but in middle school, her music teacher had complimented her on her voice and keen ear for tuning. And as the days drew on, she began the unconscious switch of humming to singing.

It became routine to constantly be singing quietly. Even if she wasn't singing out loud, even if her thoughts were elsewhere, there was music in her mind. Some days she didn't know when she was singing or listening to her brains recording of her own voice. She hadn't realized her unconscious humming until Ulquoirra inquired about it.

"What is that noise?" he gazed at her from across the small table.

"What noise?" she strained her ears to pick up any sounds.

"That noise you were just making through your nose."

"My nose?" A hand quickly darted up to her face in alarm before she processed his meaning. "Oh! Humming! I was humming."

"Humming?"

She nodded, and demonstrated.

"What were you humming?"

She blushed sheepishly, "Um, I'm not quite sure. An old song."

"A song? As in music?"

Orihime noded.

Ulquiorra returned to his food.

The next time they ate, Orihime worked up enough courage to ask her guard if he knew any songs.

"We don't have any songs or music."

She balked openly at that statement, "No music?"

He shook his head and began to eat again while she remained in open shock.

"Why?" she asked after a few minutes of silence.

"It's a human creation. I understand that most of your songs speak of feelings of romance."

Orihime nodded.

"Such songs are useless to arrancar that are completely incapable of such feelings."

She looked down at her hands and was silent for the remainder of the meal.

A few days later, and she asked why they didn't have music.

"You can have music without words," she argued hopefully.

He fixed her with his usual platonic stare.

"Where does your music come from?"

She frowned in confusion.

"Why do humans make music?" he clarified.

"Well," she began in thought, "for a number of reasons. To celebrate, to mourn, to excite, for ceremony…"

"And those who write music, where do they create the music? Where does it come from?"

And she understood.

For humans, for her, it was a projection of feelings from the soul. And the hollow, the creature, before her had no soul, nor heart. Ulquiorra could not feel joy, or sorrow, and could not understand the purpose of her singing. Were all arrancar this way? Did they have no understanding, or need, or music? The thought brought tears, and she continued to cry silently after Ulquoirra had long departed her room.


End file.
